'NSA-proof' Protonet server crowdfunds $1m in under 90 minutes

A GERMAN STARTUP has been inundated with financial support after revealing plans for a "NSA proof" server.

Protonet had asked for €100,000, or about $136,000, at crowdfunding website Seedmatch to begin production, but raised a total of $2m after smashing through the $1m barrier in just 89 minutes.

A team of 23 launched Protonet last year to offer private cloud servers and had already raised nearly $4m to get the company off the ground, but the speed that the community embraced the latest Protonet funding request took them by surprise.

The Reset The Net movement struck a chord with the community, beating the record previously held by the Kickstarter funded Veronica Mars movie, which hit the $1m mark in four hours.

The Protonet website explained, "Protonet's mini server combines basic capabilities with the advantages of local hardware: Scalability, high storage capacity and control."

"We offer location-independent data access, a thought-through social collaboration platform and all this with no necessary maintenance and installation."

The bespoke Linux OS based server includes private clients for popular services like Dropbox that have been built from the ground up.

All this privacy comes at a price, however with the commercial versions of the lady-named range of servers - Maya, Carlita and Carla - starting at $1,650 and ranging up to $6,400. The top of the range Carla version has an Intel Xeon processor with up to 16GB of RAM and 12TB of storage. µ